What is wrong with people?
What kind of person walks up to a griffin and knocks its head off?
Or an eye-high butterfly? Or a mass of Malaysian lizards?
You wouldn’t think Malaysian lizards would thrive in Saskatoon in February, but they were doing fine until someone went and ruined them last weekend. It happened at WinterShines, a festival that entertains the notion that winter isn’t so bad.
That idea is up for debate. But there’s no doubt the organizers meant well. There was a soup competition. There was an ice slide, there was an “ice cycle” bike parade. And there were ice sculptures: Large, intricately carved pieces of crystallized art depicting various fantastical creatures.
I’m pretty sure that WinterShines didn’t include an ice sculpture vandalism contest. That activity would have occurred unofficially, after hours. A long wall of sponsors’ ice blocks was only partially destroyed, a sign that the idiots couldn’t wait to get to the good stuff. But from the trail of destruction, one can assume that a group of lead-footed, bat-bearing hooligans really showed those statues who was boss. There were no witnesses. Dead icemen tell no tales.
It’s an odd thing to stumble upon a mythical creature’s severed head just sitting there with no one around to mourn its passing. I toured the disaster site two days after WinterShines ended, on an unseasonably warm Tuesday afternoon. The area was deserted — no human in sight, neither law-abiding nor cretinous.
The shards of ice on the ground made it look like I’d missed a wild party. The square had a doomed-and-knowing-it look. It was waiting for the sun to finish it off. An exhausted animal that can’t run from the lions anymore.
Ice sculptures are ephemeral. Their beauty cannot last. That is part of their poetry. But it’s one thing for Mother Nature to gently un-evolve them into their aqueous primordial state and quite another to have it happen at the whim of a pack of midnight-marauding nocturnal Neanderthals.
It’s an embarrassment to the city, of course. It’s not pleasant knowing that we share our home with people who are capable of doing this sort of thing. They should suffer for their evil. Revenge is in order — served extremely cold. The vandals should be rounded up and have Sno-Cones poured down their baggy gangsta-ass pants. They should be forced to reassemble everything they smashed. They should be frozen in cubes like bugs in amber.
But before we start lighting the torches, I must admit one thing. I can see the attraction. Yes, I can. The urge to destroy is in me, too. I can well imagine the sick satisfaction of taking a baseball bat and going totally Goodfellas on a fancy carving.
The urge goes back farther than my memory, when my childhood self tackled his first snowman and stomped his first sandcastle. I’ve seen it in my own children — one brother’s irresistible urge to knock down a building block tower engineered by the other brother. If toy makers were honest they would call them what they are: “Destroying blocks.” There’s something more than fun in that. It’s practically necessary, as if the patience of stacking the blocks creates the need for an equal and opposite reaction. Thus is the planet’s equilibrium restored.
Wrecking is as much a part of the human condition as creating. If you’ve ever tried to fix a stupid toaster, given up, and in a moment of blind rage taken a hammer to it, you know what I mean. The Visigoths didn’t have to sack Rome in 410 — it wasn’t even the capital of the empire by then. It just felt so good. That’s why drunk rock stars rent hotel rooms. That’s why windshields and golf clubs have helped so many cheated-on wives get a start on their new lives.
We’re talking about spiritual health here. Maybe it’s better to admit to our destructive tendencies than to pretend they don’t exist, only to be ambushed by them one night when we guzzle a 40 of rye and realize that nothing would be more cathartic than, like, totally wrecking some kind of half-lion, half-bird ice animal, man.
Naturally, the perpetrators should be punished. They failed to control their anti-social impulses. Iron bars and razor wire aren’t the best substitutes for that missing will power, but they will have to do.
In the next few weeks, WinterShines will dissolve into memory. But no amount of sun will melt the truth: People who like their lives make their mark on the world by creating beautiful things. People who hate their lives make ugly marks on beautiful things. Nature in balance. It’s the cold truth.

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